Thursday, March 19, 2015

"Apple could, in this way, become the trusted source of ratings data Nielsen tries to be but is increasingly failing at. With Nielsen struggling to capture viewing beyond three days, and all viewing on TV Everywhere platforms, it’s serving the content owners and pay TV providers poorly. Some of the pay TV providers have their own data on that viewing, but since they are incentivized to maximize those numbers, they don’t represent a trusted party and this data counts for little. Apple, on the other hand, wouldn’t directly benefit from higher ratings numbers, and could, at the same time, provide very granular tracking and reporting of exactly what’s been watched, by which users, for how long, etc. It would be a trusted third party in much the same way as Nielsen is. This would be valuable for the content owners and give them something traditional pay TV providers can’t. Apple could capture the actual quality of experience on the end user side, something most cloud providers can’t do because they only see their end of the stream."